Aluminium: With an 'i', America.
Is that so, Britain?
Photo: Marcos André - https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcodede/116648094/
British speakers have a long history of dissing the way Americans talk and spell. At times it can feel like a singular sibling rivalry, but history shows that Britain has taken a superior attitude for centuries with most other countries on the planet too. The relationship with America just gets more airtime, which may have something to do with geographical proximity or maybe with a small skirmish that took place between 1775 and 1783.
In some cases, the Brits have a point about US usage. But most of the time, they don’t.
Take aluminium (I’m from New Zealand, where British spelling is the norm). Despite the British spelling, and even despite the fact that the word’s predecessor (more on which in a moment) was invented by an English chemist Sir Humphry Davy, aluminium did not become the preferred spelling anywhere until four years after Davy coined the original name.
Here’s the timeline. By the late 1700s, chemists were aware of a compound called alumina (which we now more commonly call aluminium oxide). In 1808, Davy discovered that the element we now call aluminium could be extracted by passing an electric current through alumina.
Davy initially dubbed the new element alumium before amending it later to aluminum. Note the presence of only one “i” in the later spelling.
So when and how did the second i find its way into the word?
When it did was 1812, fully four years after Humphry coined alumium. How it got there was thanks to literary and political periodical The Quarterly Review, which haughtily stated in its September edition: “Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound.”
Well! How stuck-up-and-arrogant-19th-century-British can you be?
Oddly, the new spelling stuck. Or maybe not so oddly, for this was an age besotted with all things classical. Just ask Greece, who, from 1801 to 1812, suffered the ignominy of watching Britain run off with half the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon, along with works from the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike and the Propylaia. Named the Elgin Marbles after Burglar-in-Chief Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, they’re one of history’s great lootings and - thanks to a stubborn refusal to entertain their return - an ongoing stain on Britain’s global reputation.
But I digress.
The Elgin Marbles. Thomas Bruce spent the equivalent of around five million pounds in today’s money to have them transported to England.
To be fair, the new spelling did make a certain kind of sense. Other metallic elements such as sodium and potassium (which had also been named by Davy) already shared the -ium suffix, and from about 1812, as more and more metallic elements were discovered, -ium became more or less compulsory. Hence uranium, chromium, borium, cadmium, lithium and plutonium.
Which means you could make a case for America (and Canada, which also uses aluminum) being out of step. The case is strengthened by the fact that the entire rest of the English-speaking world spells it aluminium. The US and Canada are the only two holdouts.
The case was further strengthened in 1990 when the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) stated that aluminium was the international standard. In doing so, they were undercutting the American Chemical Society (ACS), which adopted aluminum in 1925.
If you do make that case, however, take care. Being out of step with others doesn’t make you wrong. In this instance, North America could - with some justification - claim that it is the one part of the world honouring Davy’s preferred spelling, a spelling that he never indicated he was unhappy with. What’s more, no overwhelming case has ever been made for preferring anything else.
That may be one reason most scientific and technical organisations recognise both spellings, even when they have a preferred option. If that sounds wishy-washy to you, it isn’t - many words can be spelt more than one way in the same country, including moveable/movable, ambience/ambiance, counselor/counsellor, racket/racquet. Then there’s the gazillion or so words that are spelt differently in different countries, like colour/color, recognise/recognize, and aeon/eon. Going to war over which spelling is “right” is a waste of valuable arguing time, especially when the world has more pressing matters to attend to, like whether to add the milk to your coffee first or second. (The correct answer is actually to have your coffee black.)
Aluminum belongs to a large class of words that are often thought of as American inventions but are, in fact, British creations no longer used in that part of the world. They include fall (for autumn), gotten (considered somewhat tawdry, even though Shakespeare used it), rookie and diaper (from Old French. Nappy - short for napkin - didn’t become common usage in Britain until the 20th century).
This phenomenon isn’t limited to language. Much of what is thought of as American folk music (wonderfully defined by Pete Seeger as “all the music that fits between the cracks”) has its roots in the British Isles. The song Pretty Polly originated in England and Scotland as The Gosport Tragedy. Likewise, a host of jigs, reels, hornpipes and other dances are British imports.
While criticising others’ supposed mangling of the language is a popular sport, I regard it as a stupid activity. America has spent the last few centuries panelbeating the English language to fit its own purposes, and in the process has given us countless new words and phrases as well as a rich vein of literature from the likes of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Annie Proulx, Robert Frost, Frank O’Hara and many others. Alongside them are musicians like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Laurie Anderson, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, and composers like Cole Porter and Philip Glass.
In my view, no part of this wonderful edifice would have been possible without America (which includes Canada) first breaking away from Britain and forging its own identity. If, in the process, some of what got created was less than wonderful, so what? Try reading Shakespeare’s early plays some time and see how they stack up against his later work. (Hint: they don’t.)
Aluminum? I say go for it, America! I can live without a second i as long as you keep churning out novels and poetry that are worth reading and music that’s worth listening to. On that note, check out Vampire Weekend’s latest album, Only God Was Above Us. Not too dusty.
Bits and specious
Here’s a gorgeous track off Only God Was Above Us.
When he wrote The Ballad of Hollis Brown, Bob Dylan drew on Pretty Polly for its tune.
In the year that the Quarterly Review passed its edict on the spelling of aluminium, its editor was English critic, editor and poet William Gifford. Gifford was famous for what Wikipedia describes as a “lifelong tendency to unmoderated invective”, while also being regarded as one the best satirists of his time. Kathryn Sutherland, professor of the Faculty of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, once suggested that he may have had an editorial hand in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
You may have wondered what distinguishes a metal from other elements. I know I did. According to Britannica, a metal is “any of a class of substances characterized by high electrical and thermal conductivity as well as by malleability, ductility, and high reflectivity of light”. About three quarters of all known elements are metals - and not all of them end in -ium. More here.
Quote of the week
I went to watch Pavarotti once. He doesn’t like it when you join in.
Mick Miller
What a pleasure! So glad I clicked the link in Heddwen Newton's English in Progress.